Frontend

I'm getting increasing conviction around the idea of using sync engines instead of APIs for building apps

The idea is simple: 

- apps read and write to a local db or object
- a sync engine keeps this magically synced with server db
- sync is designed to be conflict free (using crdts or similar)

Technowatermelon. Elder Millenial. Building Farcaster. 

nf.td/varun

The real hard stuff is in the sync engine - it has to be designed to be conflict free (which imposes some restrictions on the types of operations) and has to be very performant at scale.

@kam has a great post on this here, which I recommend reading:

@kam has a great post on this here, which I recommend reading: https://bricolage.io/some-notes-on-local-first-development/

fly also has a new blog post explaining their pov on this design:

fly also has a new blog post explaining their pov on this design: https://fly.io/blog/skip-the-api/

electric sql is also working on something in the space:

electric sql is also working on something in the space: https://electric-sql.com/

The main unlock is the developer experience - testing apps as a frontend dev is very simple once you have the db model. There's no server mocks or anything like that and the testability is very high. 

You also get a lot of advanced features like collaborative editing for free.